here's the thing
by raggedymangoodbyes
Summary: Lily Luna Potter has a problem, and he's tall, dark and handsome. {LP/OC}


_a wild next gen fic appears! I don't know what I'm doing and this is only 700 words ish so if you don't like it, my apologies, it took me about five minutes. But I'm trying to start writing again, so:_

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Lily Luna Potter has a problem, and he's tall, dark and handsome.

The first time she sort-of-accidently fell into bed with him, it was summer and he was at her house He was sitting under the tree at the bottom of her garden, and him and Al were charming the leaves to flap like wings, and they were dive-bombing James and his girlfriend, who were trying to dance haphazardly to the music – she was graceful and he was clumsy, and the plants entangling themselves in their hair didn't help. His skin is so dark as to be almost the colour of the night and his eyes slant and they're like melted chocolate, and when he's near her her skin feels itchy, and sometimes they duel and she feels a rush the same as when his lips are on her. Then, though, she didn't realise any of this, because she was young and stupid and thought she just hated him.

He got her drunk; she was fifteen, just about to go into fifth year, and she thought she was a big bad Slytherin girl, but in fact she wasn't grown up enough at all to be able to withstand many glasses of firewhisky, let alone the number Al plied her with when Teddy, her protector Teddy, had his back turned. The adults laughed at her as she staggered, and then they were exploring the fields behind Godric's Hollow and somehow they lost Al (to this day she doesn't know where he went, whether he knew what was going to happen, though she doubts it), and then she was falling and he was catching her and somehow their lips brushed, inelegantly, and then they were tumbling to the grass with gasps of shock that anything could feel this burning and not hurt.

Nowadays, now it's been almost a year, and she's meant to be doing her OWLs and he's meant to be doing his NEWTs, they have to snatch moments, so his girlfriend (Emerald Sevell, tall and blonde and clingy and, she's sure, dynamite in bed) can't see and her brother (only one now; James has gone, and Anna Corner with him to keep him in check, and she hears one day that she's left him, fed up at last of his bullshit and arrogance, and she remembers the stories her father would tell of the original James Potter and Lily Evans and her heart aches) doesn't notice his best friend is missing. They talk about muggle Shakespeare and wizarding Laurent, and they laugh because it's fun to have no strings attached, and when he's pressing butterfly kisses to the insides of her thighs and she's gripping the headboard of his bed and she feels like she could fly she can forget that he's taking such a big risk. Because however much he's been accepted as Al's friend, he's still a Zabini, his father still stood by and watched people die, he still bears the name, and she knows that if they'd been born in a different time he wouldn't press his skin to hers, like a checkerboard.

Anyway, now she has a problem, and its name is Theo Zabini.

The problem is not the way she feels when he sits next to her as they watch old muggle films with Al and Dom and Victoire during winter break and his hand, hidden by the blanket, slips into her knickers; nor is it, even, the anger she sometimes gets rising in his chest when she hears his careless I love yous tossed in the direction of his Pureblood girlfriend.

Okay, maybe the I love yous are the problem.

The problem is that she likes to watch him smoke by the lake after curfew, the silver curling out of his mouth and obscuring the stars. She likes it when he puts his arm round her afterwards, she likes the patterns he traces with the tips of his fingers on her bare skin, almost accidently, she likes it when he says her name into the sky and she likes it when he says that he wants her, only her, even though she knows it's a lie. She wants him to sketch her like he does his girlfriend, lip caught between his teeth, charcoal smudging his fingers, she wants him to slide his arm around her waist in front of Al and see his reaction and not care about it because she's next to him.

But none of these things will ever happen, and she can see it in the way he's begun to make more and more excuses, and in revenge she's begun flirting with other guys, and she likes the way his eyes blaze. She likes _him_.

Lily Luna has a problem, and he's tall, dark and handsome.


End file.
